I can’t tell whether inertia is trolling us (inadvertent or not) but I’ll try to lay out the reasoning for why some people like to play spoiler rather than just live and let live.

In my case I am typically unavailable during domination end times thus unless I just happen to be free that week, my primary chance of medals happens in the opening weeks of the season when I can utterly crush my bracket. In most of the other weeks I can build up a pretty decent position but the inability to play cards during end time kills my ability to react to a changing pod.

Thus in order to have some impact on the game I’ll act as artillery and help other people in the klan get medals and/or male reproductive organblock people in other klans. For me the medals are secondary to actually being able to influence the game in a meaningful way.

Many of the european players are horribly impacted by the endtime as well and have taken to artillery roles as well.

Finally a small percentage of players (scully is chief among these) simply like nuking the opposition and emptying the pod of all scoops. These players have consistently pushed for a destructor medal so that destruction focused players can actually medal.

There are always going to be weeks that you are going to be noncompetitive because you are early in a pistachio loop or you just get bad luck when you are doing a solo vanilla run. On those weeks no matter what you do you can’t possibly catch up to the leaders in your pod. So instead of just blowing off the week and sitting around pbumively you card down to zero and decide that even if you can’t possibly win you are going to take some of the other fraggers down too.

The problem is that far too many people are entirely tooooo pbumive when it comes to domination, they figure if they can’t medal they might as well not try. The result is that there are entire groups of pods that might have one player in the 200+ scoop range with 15-20 people in the 40-80 range and instead of carding down and nuking the leader they just sit on their hands and do nothing insuring the leader gets an easy pbum to 4 medals.

This results in a very boring, very static game where the handful of really competitive players utterly dominate the competition.

this no ties thing is death to actual raiding clans. if you aren’t going to let us tie with eachother, and we are all in the same damn bracket, then why even join in the raid?

it goes against individual interests to raid, since you are helping your competitors, but not raiding is detrimental to klan interests, since it leads to boredom, loss of players, and stagnation.

The only solution I can think of is to set up seeding such that any single clan won’t dominate a bracket. a handful of smaller top brackets would be fine.

Well because cooperation even for a smaller piece of the pie is better than trying to go it alone. bumuming even a decent number of people make it to raids then people will still be getting 500-800 scoops on their mains with 3 raids in a week. In contrast even with a ton of choco solo players are largely limited to solo vanilla, pistachio loops and speedruns. Yes big klans will likely fragment in order to maximize self interest but CZ wants more raiding klans rather than one superpowerful one.

Card limits might or might not be too low but this change will encourage raiders to get a handful of switcheroos early on and play them during raids. The rest of the week will be devoted to playing offense cards on your competitors and playing defense when you are in the lead.

Bingebot has also talked about increasing the number of medals each week so the pool might be larger than 4 medals split among one klan.

This coming week, would you like us to ignore that-which-must-not-be-named and consider only how the rate of scoops from incit compares to antifreeze, lemon sherbet, and pistachio, then?

It’ll likely have some influence on domination but will mainly be felt in the lower brackets. Further even in the upper brackets the amount of choco one can earn in addition to the other sources of scoops can often spell a significant difference in how many scoops you get in the week and consequentially how many cards you have available. If we bumume that ties in medals are likely going away in the near future this means that being able to maximize your scoops from forumbuildr and/or INCIT will likely be a major part of winning a pod in the future.

Realistically 5-10 wins a day is not impossible in INCIT especially if you lurk in there for hours but even at 1 for 1 reward that will be roughly 35-70 scoops which is not that much more than gambling can get you and definitely less than what some people get from forumbuildr.

It’s difficult to nerf minrepair without gimping low level people who often struggle during levels 6-7 to scrap up enough to get past the forums they need to beat to pay off the drrty cop. Despite having a DML myself I don’t necessarily agree that trolls should be able to make an enormous profit off of grinding faux news.
Here are some possible solutions

1) Declare a moratorium on grinding faux like Arktor suggests. Easy to implement but a pain in the bum to enforce.

2)Another solution would be limit the number of times that a character can run faux to 1 in a given day. That way they can still make up some ground but they can’t outpace the camwhores and emos by an insane amount.

3)Another solution would be to adjust the credit bonus faux recieves so that it still gives a slight bonus over praypal but that it’s not worth the huge amount it is currently. After all being able to grind praypal with no consumable costs is pretty nice, being able to grind faux for a profit is still pretty ridiculous.

4)The final suggestion is to redo the damaged item system (or possible faux itself) in some way that forces faux to be a more pyrrhic battle. That way people can still defeat it but people are unlikely to grind it for fun and profit.(view post)

Well also keep in mind that by Evil Trout’s own admission the primary limiter on the Mona Lisa is supposed to be it’s fragility and high upkeep costs. However with the aid of one wither streaking or minrepair it’s possible to use the DML every forum attempt without ever having to do any repair whatsoever.

As a result what was largely designed as a flezz trap has become a game breaking weapon o’ death.

permanoob attacks should be available to anyone with the peen, esp. if they force a reroll.

I’m not sure I buy this.

After all it’s possible to switch clbumes as soon as you beat the game which is typically level 8-9. Realistically not everyone who switches over to another clbum should get attacks that might be unlocked at level 12,16,20 or whenever they show up at.

Otherwise it’s quite likely that several cam-res and emo-res that got the permanoob epeen will have access to higher level re-re attacks than the handful of pure re-res that continue to struggle forward with thier re-res.

Honestly between PD, Scully and myself we can make the upper brackets pretty miserable. I have 4 in one bracket and 2 in a couple of more brackets including the top bracket. I generally make only one possibly 2 raids in a given week and in many cases that means that multiple alts can work together to dominate a bracket.

Yeah it needs to get fixed but the only real solution is to either limit the number of alts that can participate in domination (they can still help on raids but they don’t actually get placed in brackets) to a smaller manageable number or you need to place only one medaled alt into each bracket. The problem with the first solution is that it limits the fun bumociated with making alts and the problem with the second solution is that people like PD, Scully and I would have alts in each of the medal brackets plus maybe extend into nonmedalled brackets.

This creates a needlessly complex subsystem on top of an already bulky seeding mechanism. Everyone seems willing to acknowledge that klan vanilla is the destabilizing factor. It seems that rather than create a wierd seeding mechanism where raiders only fight raiders you would just come up with some solution to klan vanilla issues. If klan vanilla is fixed then non-raiding klans and solo players are much more competitive.

Well i’m sure there were some solo vanilla earned in those raids (too good not to pbum up) I venture a large number of the vanillas were earned by rapid rollover of denture chat. I didn’t join the last 2 raids but I think on average most of us can bring an alt or two to the table and some of us like scully, pd and myself can bring 6-10 alts to bear on a raid.

Yes it’s a nightmare to coordinate that many alts (hell it took me ages to card down on my alts) but you can burn through a ton of visits in a very short period of time if you are willing to push/pull as needed.

Honestly I’m not an accurate person to be using. Yes I have 10 medals and am I member of Episode 2 Beta but I joined this week and all my previous medals were earned as a solo player in a solo klan just like your tarman.

There are tons of reasons why people are noncompetitive in domination: not in a competitive klan, target of a competitive klan, in a competitive klan but unable to raid as often as other players, focused on non-domination aspects of the game.

Changing the bracketing system wouldn’t fix the underlying issues that plague domination but they might alleviate some of the symptoms. However you are right there are going to be less competitive members of competitive klans that are going to dominate the lower medal brackets. Further there are going to be players like Scully, Pickled, Myself and even you that have access to a large number of very competitive alts that are going to be perpetually pushed into less competitive brackets.

Further as the majority of episode 2 beta and brainfreeze are getting cleared out of the scrub brackets there are going to be a large number of players from enjoy and 70 character storytellers that get medals in the next couple of weeks. Some will get 4 medals and get placed in the top bracket and they will be screwed for the next month or so.

Currently there are like only 3-5 non-cheater trolls with the DML: Pluvius, Ruiner of Fun, and Paraone (there might be some others as well). Those 3 have a major advantage in regards to GfoC and Faux News but that’s with ridiculous upkeep costs.